The things we carry...
It's said that God gives the most challenges to those with the strongest character. It's said that one is never dealt more load than they alone can carry. It's said that we are not defined by merely our success, but more how we respond in the face of adversity.
These are the things we repeat to ourselves in the moments when it seems we have lost it all. Because we need to believe there is some higher plan for the pain we must endure -- lessons that seem, at the very heart of it, down right unfair.
Two weeks ago, I came home to find a single grayed newspaper clipping on the kitchen counter, and my mother gone. "Karen Garrow, 56, of Homestead..." it read, "dead at 56." Karen was my mother's best girlfriend for years. When hurricane Andrew took our house in 1992, it was at Karen's house where we stayed the night before the morning that changed my life forever. They had lost touch in all of the movings, all of the numbers marked "Carole Cell - New, Carole Cell New NEW." My mother had been begging me for what had seemed like the last six months to take her for a drive down to Homestead, to look for Karen, on her ranch. "You can't just show up on someone's doorstep," I said. "Just try to Google her and see what you can find." But that Wednesday afternoon, when my mother sat down to read the paper, the last thing she expected to read was her best friend's obituary.
It's the unexpected, swift jabs to the gut, that get us most when we are far off daydreaming. It's showing up to work one day, and reading a discarded printed email on the copier that deems your skills "useless." It's a blissful two year relationship ending in just two hours. It's a silly disagreement that turns into pride fattening tongues for years. It's an eviction notice, out of the blue, just when you're getting back on your feet again.
Whatever it is though, we keep going... because he never gives us more than we can handle. We push through the darkness, the weight on our backs, the heaviness on our hearts, with an endurance in our stride.
